FreeWithoutResponsibility™

Three thousand years’ worth of philosophers have argued about this one. (Five thousand, if you include the Chinese.)

What is Freedom? What is Responsibility?

The balance between the two is central to most monotheist religions.

But it’s not central to FOSS. Oh, no.

The central idea behind FOSS is as follows. “Give me all your stuff, and I promise to give it to everybody else.” Well, there’s a slight problem right there, but let it slide. Let it slide.

How can I make money out of this? Easy. Just offer “support.” (It doesn’t really matter that a marketing and sales organisation based around call centres aren’t, typically, all that good at the actual software thing. Why should they be? Let it slide.)

“We offer Enterprise-Ready Software Solutions, based on Linux! We Are CentOS!” OK, five maniacs in a virtual basement. Granted, a different five maniacs from the original five maniacs, but still.

“It went tits up? But this is Free Software! The central raison d’etre of Free Software is Emergent Righteousness! Tell us what went wrong, and we’ll get the million eyes on it right now!”

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And after the inevitable catastrophe: “It’s not our fault! We are not responsible!”

Quite right on the second point. Nobody in the Land of Loon is responsible. Entirely the contrary. They are totally Irresponsible.

Unfortunately, in the real world, if something goes wrong (video, sound, WiFi, random driver, etc etc etc), somebody is held to be responsible.

Just not a Loon.

Let it slide.